Television and radio industry have developed and thrived with the advent of entertaining program information sponsored by commercial interests. The commercial interests underwrite production of entertainment portion of broadcasts in exchange for brief interruption of the entertainment portion with advertising program segments, commonly referred to as commercials. While some commercials are themselves entertaining to some viewers, or human users, other commercials are found to be more objectionable than entertaining. Therefore, what is needed is a device and method for eliminating commercials which may be objectionable to a user.
Prior methods have used changes in audio levels or picture characteristics to determine a change from the entertainment portion of the broadcast to a commercial portion of the broadcast. These methods have several disadvantages. First, the characteristics indicative of a commercial may also occur in the entertainment portion causing the method to improperly detect the presence of a commercial and interrupt the desired entertainment portion of a broadcast. Second, the duration of the interruption may be incorrect as differing commercials have different durations. And third, some of the commercials are themselves entertaining, and even could be undesirably eliminated. Finally, some prior methods have processed program information recorded and stored locally, on a video cassette recorder for example, to determine if a periodicity of the change in characteristics match a typical commercial duration in order to determine the presence of a commercial. However this method does not work in a real time broadcast of television information and also eliminates commercials which a user may find desirable.
Thus, what is needed is a method and device for selectively and accurately eliminating commercials, or other program information, having variable intervals during the broadcast of the program.